WANDERING AROUND: A MANAGER'S BEST EDGE

In the private or public sector, in big business or small, we observe that there are only two ways to create and sustain superior performance over the long haul. First, take exceptional care of your customers via superior service and superior quality. Second, constantly innovate.

Obviously, two courses of action do not constitute all that's needed. Sound financial controls are essential. Those without them fail, period. Solid planning is not a luxury but a necessity.

It turns out that neither superior customer service nor constant innovation -- the two sustaining edges of excellence -- is built upon genius in the executive suite or mystical strategic moves that allow one to gain a 5- or 10-year advantage over one's competitors. Both are built, instead, on a bedrock of listening, trust and respect for the dignity and the creative potential of each person in the organization.

Thus, customer courtesy means courtesy from the accounting department, from the purchasing department and the engineers, as well as from the salespeople. Quality, too, is an all-hands operation. The winners stun us not by their cleverness but by the fact that each and every tiny aspect of the business is just a touch better than the norm.

However one element that connects all the others is missing. It is leadership: vision, cheerleading, enthusiasm, love, trust, verve, passion, obsession, consistency, the use of symbols, paying attention as illustrated by the content of one's calendar, out-and-out drama (and the management thereof), creating heroes at all levels, coaching, effectively wandering around and numerous other things. Leadership must be present at all levels of the organization. It depends on a million little things done with obsession, consistency and care, but all of those million little things add up to nothing if the trust, vision and basic belief is not there.

The brand of leadership we propose has a simple base of MBWA (Managing By Wandering Around). To "wander" with customers (at least 25 percent of the time) and vendors and our own people is to be in touch with the first vibrations of the new. Information based on hard data is usually a day late and always sterile.

In our work with groups of all sorts, we have commented time and again that we can make a strong case that the No. 1 managerial productivity problem in America is managers who are out of touch with their employees and customers. And the alternative, "being in touch," doesn't come via computer printouts or the endless stream of overhead transparencies viewed in 10,000 darkened meeting rooms stretching across the continent. Being in touch means tangible, visceral ways of being informed.

To listen is just that: to listen. "Naive" customer listening. Raw impressions. They are not substitutes for computer printouts -- but there are no substitutes for them either.

Consider this 1983 analysis of the source of many of General Motors Corp.'s problems by a student at the Stanford Sloan Program, a yearlong program of Stanford University's business department:

"They (executives) drive down the highway outside Detroit. All the car company employees and suppliers are virtually required to buy American cars. He looks to his left, looks to his right. 'Everybody's still driving American cars' registers at some level. Then he pulls into the company garage. His car is gone over from stem to stern for the next 10 hours. When he leaves work, he gets in, it starts like a charm and 'the things do work' registers.

"All the tons of market research data that we have don't make up for the lack of feel. If even one of the companies or even one car-producing division moved to California, they would have learned the bitter truth: Californians just don't like American cars anymore. These odd names -- Honda, Toyota, Nissan -- are all over the highways out here. Even I, and I consider myself pretty darned enlightened, didn't really 'feel it' in the most important sense until I moved out to Palo Alto. I started subconsciously counting Japanese cars at intersections. I was incredulous. I'd tell my colleagues about it, back home. They didn't fathom what I was saying, as I hadn't before I came out here and lived it for myself."

Although Campbell Soup Chairman Gordon McGovern hasn't burned the computer printouts, keeping in touch is a keystone to his effort to innovate based upon listening. Business Week (Dec. 24, 1984) reports:

"McGovern recently convened his directors in the back room of a supermarket for a board meeting, after which they roamed the store aisles probing shoppers for comments about Campbell's products. He regularly dispatches company executives to the kitchens of some 300 women across the country to see how meals are prepared. And he insists that his managers do their own grocery shopping.

"McGovern himself can be found every Saturday in his neighborhood supermarket, stocking the family larder.

" 'Gordon's made it his business to be out in the marketplace, getting to know his customers, whoever they may be,' says Allen Bildner, president of Kings Super Markets Inc., in West Caldwell, N.J. With the entire food industry scrambling to meet America's changing tastes, McGovern's determination is the key to his dream of transforming Campbell into the nation's most market- sensitive food company -- almost an about-face for the once-cautious food processor."